The Big East held its 9th annual Rumor Mill Day yesterday at Giants Stadium. Oh, formally it was the league’s football media day, but the only time commissioner Mike Tranghese gets to talk football at these gatherings is during his opening remarks.

Then he has to address the year’s hot rumor, which in 1999 is, “Will Miami leave the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference?”

“I’m starting my 10th year [as commissioner] and I literally have lived in crisis management,” said Tranghese. “When you think about it we haven’t had a moment in which something has not challenged our structure.”

Last year Tranghese spent Big East media day fending off questions about Syracuse leaving to join the Big Ten. Never happened. How about the one where Pittsburgh was leaving for the Big Ten? Never happened. Rutgers to the Big Ten? Nope. Syracuse to the ACC? Uh-uh. West Virginia to the SEC? Nope. Virginia Tech to, well, who cares?

Tranghese knows why members of his league are often targeted by other conferences. First of all, many of the schools sit squarely in major television markets. Secondly, the Big East still is the new kid on the block, striving to build the tradition of a Big Ten.

Here’s some friendly advice for Big East members:

If you’re as tired of the rumors as your commissioner, if you’re sick of being perceived as a second-class conference, then the next time the ACC or Big Ten calls, hang up. Every time you get an invitation from some credit card company in North Dakota, do you open the junk mail or do you trash it?

“Our schools have to stop talking to people,” said Tranghese. “Any time one of our schools doesn’t step up and say, I have no interest in talking to people, than the talk is going to continue.”

Miami coach Butch Davis spoke quite glowingly about the Hurricanes affiliation with the Big East, as he should. If not for the Big East, Miami still would be a renegade program where arrests were stats.

And the basketball program would be a joke. No wonder an embarrassed basketball coach Leonard Hamilton called Tranghese to apologize for his university’s decision to entertain overtures from the ACC.

“I hope that it doesn’t hurt either of us because it has been a good relationship,” said Davis. “We’ve developed a great relationship with the other schools in the conference. We’ve got almost 10 years invested in developing something that hasn’t existed at Miami and that’s rivalries.”

“I think there’s an awful lot of real positive benefits to the league,” continued Davis. “It’s got the most national exposure, opportunities to play in Boston and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and New York. Long before Miami joined the conference, if you looked at our roster or you looked in our class rooms, 30 to 40 percent of the enrollment is from Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey.”

Of course, money is what fuels all of these rumors, which is another reason no Big East football school should be taking calls from the ACC. In the ACC, all nine schools evenly share the wealth brought in by the schools that go to bowl games. In the Big East, tams that qualify for bowls get bonuses, along with bonuses for booking attractive non-conference opponents. Last year Syracuse received $4.5 million of the $13.5 million in Big East bowl revenues.

And should the ACC add a 10th member, that would mean nine league games, leaving little scheduling flexibility. Miami, which plays seven league games in the Big East, will play Penn State this year and has recently signed a home-and-home deal with Florida.